A blog turning into a game

Common Sense Media, a national advocacy group dedicated to the intersection of kids and the media, published an informative report that measures the Internet safety of popular social networking sites for kids.

The report measures sites across five dimensions: staff responsiveness, flagging features, privacy controls, age barriers, and content policy. Privacy controls is an interesting area from a product perspective; it is likely parents who are most concerned about how much personal information is revealed (directly or indirectly) by their kids. Even if proper privacy controls are put in place, unmonitored use of the Internet would render those controls useless. Similarly, with age barriers, kids can easily populate the birth date and “parent e-mail” fields with acceptable information so that they can complete registration, regardless of how old they actually are or if their parents were involved in the process. I’m not sure what more sites can really do to prevent misuse and adhere to COPA.

Sites that were examined include Club Penguin, Facebook, and MySpace. YouTube was included in the report as well, due to the large number of young people going to the site.

Common Sense Media is a terrific organization that does what it can to promote safe, but high-quality content for kids on the Internet. Keep up the good work!

When learning about the state of the education system from some of my classmates in business school who were former teachers, I was briefed on, among other things, No Child Left Behind. Briefly, the act has placed a strong emphasis on creating and meeting academic standards at the state-level in math and reading. Schools are judged based on how well their students are doing relative to those standards.

As a result, the education community has been monitoring how schools have adjusted their curriculum to mold to this new policy. Someone recently pointed me to a report released a few months ago by the Center on Education Policy (CEP). The main conclusion of the report was that schools generally are shifting their attention to math and reading, at the expense of other areas, including social studies and the arts. Specifically,

“In its earlier report, CEP found that a majority of school districts—62 percent— had increased time for English language arts (ELA) and/or math in elementary schools since school year 2001-02. Meanwhile, 44 percent had increased time for ELA and/or math at the elementary level, while simultaneously cutting time from one or more areas including science, social studies, art and music, physical education, recess, and lunch.”

In many cases, the report concludes, school districts have increased the amount of instruction time devoted to language arts and math by more than 75 minutes a week.

If the CEP’s conclusions are accurate, and at a first-order they appear to be true and validated by other similar reports, a major question is how students will learn the material that is being less emphasized in schools.

Hi -

Phew, we just got WordPress installed on our machine and are ready to go. It is already late tonight (yes, even for start-up geeks), but we want to introduce ourselves with this first post.

We are a start-up in the San Francisco Bay Area that is building an engaging, educational game for kids. We think that parents and children should be rewarded with applications that leverage the rich interactivity of the Web today.

We are building products in the spirit of Learning 2.0, a term used by other start-ups looking to innovate within different parts of the education space, including Grockit and Education Revolution.

In Gujarati, the word “ramo” means “play”, and we think that the process of learning, especially for kids, should be fun.

So stay tuned!

- The Ramo Games team